Metrics

I am convinced that the membership statistics Louisville releases each year are not the most useful way to judge where we are or where we are headed as a denomination. This is because the depressing membership statistics and my personal experience with Presbyterian congregations conflict with each other. My experience of our congregations is generally positive. The statistics have been mostly negative. Despite the negative statistics, many of us experience much in our congregations that is very positive.

A couple of years ago, the Center for Congregations in Indiana hired me to conduct workshops for interested pastors. The only thing not closed? Local congregations. They are the last thing open in these towns.

If one looked at those congregations through a membership statistic, the news would be grim. They have been losing members for years as the towns in which they are located shrink in population. However, they remain open because they continue to serve their communities. Restaurants and other small businesses that served their towns are gone. The congregations continue.

I would suggest that we develop other metrics for judging/evaluating the health of a congregation. Is a congregation providing worship and programming that help its members grow spiritually; supplying spiritual support for members as they go through life’s major transitions from birth to youth to middle age to old age; helping its community cope with the enormous changes going on within it; being a prophetic voice on the pressing issues of our times; and helping the poorest in its community survive the enormous changes taking place in the town?

I can hear some of you thinking, “Sounds good, John. But how do we count those kinds of things?” Well, if Apple and other corporations can figure out how to evaluate whether or not people are satisfied with their products then we should be able to measure whether our members are growing spiritually, the number of times the pressing issues of our times are addressed directly in worship or the specific acts of support for the poor that have happened in the past year. While it is easy to count members and income, the Louisville lens focusing on such numbers is keeping us from counting the things God (and even much of the world) counts. We need to develop a better set of metrics.

A caveat: I am not saying that worship attendance is not an important metric for a congregation. Lately, it has become trendy thinking to dismiss worship attendance as a helpful indicator of a congregation’s health. The trend isn’t new. For my 40 years of ministry, I have heard people dismiss declining worship attendance with incredibly self-deluding justifications such as “I am preaching prophetically and some people just can’t handle it.” Or, “We are separating the wheat from the 1950s chaff.” Really?

Clearly, a church in a town where the town is declining in population is likely to experience a worship attendance decline as well. However, if a congregation is located in a community where growth (population, generational turnover of homes, etc.) is taking place, shouldn’t there be some growth taking place in worship attendance as well? I think so. As a consultant, I find worship attendance remains a key metric for what is or is not happening in the life of a congregation. If nothing else, declining attendance may speak to the decline of the community around it.

Presbyterians are more concerned about membership statistics than counting how many hungry people we fed in the previous year or how many times we addressed our national plague of violence from the pulpit or how many millennials are sitting in our pews even if they haven’t joined the church. It is time to start counting the right things.

Comments

The particular Presbyterian obsession over metrics, numbers, measurements is not new, and not confined to the alphabet soup of denominations with the name Presbyterian in them. Since the mid-19th century American Protestantism has assumed two foundational points of view. That all trees grow to the sky forever, in that churches and their denominational matrix, superstructure will only grow in people and square footage. The church building boom of the 1950’s assumed all couples would have 5 kids ,and always will. Also that assessments for the ongoing support and feeding of the institution will be based on reportable numbers of people. Or that ‘membership’ carried some significance. Such is the legacy of the end of Christendom. Pew rentals or assessments fell out of fashion by the 1890s. I think Per Capita is destined for such a demise as well.

If the last 40 or so years have shown churches, denominations, clergy do well with growth, not so well with decline and structural change, food fights tend to break out over diminishing resources, as churches and Presbyteries fight over the same dollar, especially as applies to the politics of per capita.

I serve a 105 member church, at least on the “roles”, though out of the 60 or so at worship any week, the 20-30 millennials and younger families have no intention of “joining” in a formal way. Nor show any inclination to buy into any denominational sponsored stuff or programs. We sponsor a prison ministry at the county jail, mentoring, counseling, worship. The only measurement or metric I care about is taking a turkey dinner to the family of an inmate. You do that often enough the institutional church will take care of itself I think.

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